PowerPoint Tutorial: How to Make a Greeting Card Using PowerPoint

Do you feel the need to personalize your greeting for an upcoming birthday or anniversary? And you don't want to use a Hallmark card or a boutique bouquet? So you're probably thinking that you need to use either Photoshop or Illustrator or any other image enhancing software and realize that you know little or nothing about either.

Did you know that you can also create beautiful and awesome greeting cards using good old PowerPoint? And that you don't need a lot of expertize or advanced PPT knowledge to do this? Well, this short PowerPoint tutorial will show you in clear and simple steps how to make a greeting card using PowerPoint.

By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to create a birthday or an anniversary card for your loved ones who will feel all the more special because of the effort you took.

To keep things as simple and easy as possible, lets start by opening a blank PowerPoint. The first thing you need to do is ensure that your slide has not text boxes. For this, right-click on your slide > select Layout > choose the blank theme.

Next, let's adjust your document size to a standard card size. You can see different standard sizes here: PowerPoint Conversion Tables. For this tutorial we're going to set our PowerPoint slide at 6 x 4 Inches, in Landscape mode.

So go to Design > Page setup. And just type in 6 on the width field and 4 on the height field. Make sure both Landscape is selected on the Orientation. Your settings should now look something like this. Now hit OK and you will see the change on your PowerPoint.

Lets start designing the card now.

1. Since this is a birthday card we would want to add some fun colors and shapes on the card. Let's start with the background.Right click on the white space of your slide and select Format Background. A dialog box will appear where you can change the color of your background.

* Click on the Color and select More Colors..., a new dialog box will open where you can select any color of your choice. In this case we are going to select Pale Pink for the background. You should have something like this by now.

2. Now that you have the background color set to a beautiful Pale Pink Color. Let's move on and create some fun shapes.

Go to Insert > Shapes > and select the Oval Shape. Hold down your Shift key on your keyboard, click and drag anywhere on your slide and you will get a Perfect circle.

By default, the color of the Shape will be something else.

3. Let's change that color by right clicking on the Circle shape you just created and select format shapes. Change the Fill to Yellow color and the Line Color to No Line.Now place the circle right in the middle with half of the circle outside the slide as shown in the image below.

4. Select the Circle shape and hit Ctrl+D on your keyboard to duplicate the circle, Hold down your Shift key on your keyboard and drag one corner of the selected shape to enlarge the shape. Now, right click on the shape and select "Send to back". Again, right click on the shape and select "Format Shape" and set the Transparency to 80%. Try aligning the shapes in the middle. Hit Shift+F5 on your keyboard to preview and you will see something like this. Hit Esc on your keyboard to exit the preview. Try moving the shapes to get something similar with the image below.

5. Now let's add more shapes. You can do this like you did from step 2, 3 and 4. Insert shapes like Stars or Donuts and change the colors and the transparency to 80%. Below is the what we have so far.

Remember, the pale pink area is the actual slide and if you preview (Shift + F5) it you will see something like this.

You can add more shapes but in our case, this is good enough. We will start adding Texts in it.

6. Got to Insert > and select Text Box. Now Click and drag anywhere on your slide to any size and type HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
You can do this anytime you want to add a new text box to add more text on the card. You can select a font which is not too serious. Something which has rounded fonts (Arial Rounded or Comic Sans) and add some color to the fonts.

Here is our final Birthday card. You can now arrange the texts, add some nice quotes and anything you feel like adding.

Now, the final stage. You can directly print if you have a printer with you by going to File > Print. If you do not have the printer, you can save the file as a PDF by going to File > Save as > PDF.
And print it out at some Printing studio, get an envelop, sign your name and you are all set.